About Alan Cranston

There will always be nations. The United States will last a long, long time, I believe. France and Germany and Japan, China, other nations, they're going to exist. But they're losing their significance and ability to deal with certain matters.

The American people are much more concerned about taxes, welfare, the deficit, crime, education, drugs, and way down somewhere low is that matter of nuclear weapon danger. So our task now is to convince the American people that it's more dangerous now than it was during the Cold War, and that's a fact.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events, having adventures and covering the activities of world leaders, appealed to me greatly. It was a very glamorous life in those days.

Unless you have a sense of values that's shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values, the organization, whether a nation or corporation or citizen group, just doesn't work very well.

I don't think there's any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done.

I don't think just scaring people is enough. That worked during the freeze days to a major extent, but we really didn't achieve that much even at that time. You have to have more, you have to give people hope and a vision of a better world.